Adventures in the City of Light: Rousseau’s Lost Children, by Gavin McCrea, reviewed
What biographer would pass up a time-travelling opportunity to meet their subject face to face? This novel’s protagonist, Gavin Mulvany, an academic specialising in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is somehow able to slip back in time to 1777, a year before the fractious French writer died. He turns from irritating fan to close companion, accompanying Jean-Jacques on long philosophical rambles and coach journeys around Paris. They attend the premiere of Voltaire’s last play (as does Marie Antoinette), call on Benjamin Franklin and visit the Marquis de Sade in a lunatic asylum. Gavin’s long-delayed book about Rousseau is concerned to solve the puzzle of why a passionate theorist on children’s education could dispatch
